Watch We Need to Talk About Kevin Online

Why? This is the story of a “bad seed,” a demon child who torments his poor mother from infancy through adolescence, while the father (played by John C. Reilly) remains blissfully unaware of his son’s malevolent nature. As a parent, I found the child’s hostile treatment of his good-hearted mother almost unbearably upsetting. And it never lets up.It didn’t help that I had read a one-line synopsis that told me the outcome of the story. If you don’t know where it’s leading, you might derive some suspense from the narrative, adapted by Rory Kinnear and director Lynne Ramsay from Lionel Shriver’s novel, even though it is told through fragmented flashbacks. For me, knowing the ending—which I won’t give away, just in case—made me all the more impatient to get there and get it over with.Trying to remove my personal feelings from the equation is difficult. I’m able to appreciate the quality of Swinton’s deeply-felt performance as a woman who feels suffocated by circumstance. Director Ramsay certainly wrings every drop of unease she can from the material. (Why would someone be drawn to this kind of story in the first place? I can’t imagine, though I wasn’t crazy about Ratcatcher, Ramsay’s highly-vaunted debut film, either.)Others have heaped praise on We Need to Talk About Kevin, and they’re entitled to their opinions. I can only be honest in describing my reaction: watching this movie was sheer torture.In "We Need to Talk About Kevin," Tilda Swinton plays a mother, Eva, who doesn't relish the role of motherhood. Her son Kevin (played as an adult by Ezra Miller) doesn't relish the role of son. Between the two of them, they're quite the dysfunctional couple.Not many movies have dealt with the ways in which mothers can be less than enamored of their children. In "Kevin," Eva's disregard eventually leads to a horrific incident that raises the question: Did she set the stage for this situation or is Kevin simply a bad seed? Even from the cradle he seems dead-eyed and bent on making life miserable for his mother.Scottish director and co-writer Lynne Ramsay, adapting the novel by Lionel Shriver, plays this story out as a species of horror story, but the pacing, interrupted by flashbacks and flash-forwards, is sluggish, the production is overdesigned, and the performances, which also include John C. Reilly as the boy's father, are too on the mark. It's a creepy and disturbing movie, but there's not a lot going on behind people's eyes. The soullessness lacks soul.

